Paraesthesia: .NET Development and Some Pictures of My Cat

All Dressed Up and No Place To Go

Jenn and I went out this weekend on an apartment/house hunt. Basically,
we discovered (or re-discovered, should I say) several key things.

Apartment complexes are the same all over. You’ve got neighbors on all
sides so you can’t win for losing. Some are nicer than others, but an
apartment’s an apartment, regardless. They all start to look the same
after you look at enough of them.

Even if an apartment has like 1200 square feet to it, the floor plan on
it will make it look like a 900 square foot place. I don’t know where
the extra 300 square feet go, but they disappear into the nethersphere,
never to be seen again.

There are trade-offs to every apartment (or rental living situation).
We found a place that was awesome inside - 1600 square feet! - but
came with a one-car garage and all other parking was on an already
crowded street. Great if you only own one car and never plan on having
guests over. Not so good otherwise. Or there’s the ones that look pretty
decent but the office staff is annoying as hell and the rest of the
neighbors look like they might steal your car. Hmmmm.

Houses are another story. We’d love to get out of the apartment and
into a house so we can stop having to smell the neighbor’s cooking and
we can act on these home improvement whims that strike us after watching
Trading
Spaces.
The problem is that we’d like something in the 1500 - 2000 square foot
range so we’ve got plenty of space, but right now we could maybe
afford something in the $150,000 range. (Trust me - I’ve sliced and
diced the budget a thousand ways, talked to people about it, calculated
it across different loan lengths, interest rates, and down payments, but
that’s about as good as it gets right now.) If I want something that
size (that isn’t a “fixer-upper”), I’m looking at moving out in the
sticks. (An interesting item to note is that new houses seem to cost
less than old houses. That is, if you move into a housing development
that is still under construction, you seem to get more for your money
than if you found someone’s house that they’re selling.)

What that all nets out to is that we can’t get into a house, and other
apartments panned out mediocre at best. We decided “better the devil you
know” and we’re staying where we’re at. To free up some space, we’re
going to get a storage closet at one of those storage places and move
some of the stuff we don’t need into that. That’ll only cost us like
$35/month and will be worth it to have the extra space in the house.

I borrowed Lilo and
Stitch
from my parents and watched it yesterday. It was okay; I didn’t go in
expecting much, and I wasn’t disappointed. I liked it enough not to feel
like my time was wasted (there were some legitimately funny parts), but
I won’t be running out to buy it or anything.

The Winter Hawks have been on a losing
streak lately and I just got the invoice for playoff tickets in the
mail. $248 a piece! I don’t think I’ll be ordering.